Working with athlete-founders.

Right now we’re working with Jack Carty, who plays professional rugby for Connacht, and Andrew Conway, the former Ireland international. We’ve also worked with Spot Recruitment, where one of the co-founders, Cillian O’Connor, has been a generational talent for Mayo GAA. And with Dr. David McHugh, sports psychologist and Director of Performance at Washington Spirit. A few of the others we work with come from serious sporting backgrounds too.

We both grew up playing sport. Nowhere near the level any of these guys reached, but enough to know what a dressing room sounds like. I played alongside Jack growing up and against Cillian a few times. We still live and breathe it. That’s part of why the work clicks.

The transition is lonely

Ten or fifteen years inside a team. The dressing room, the coaching staff, the schedule, the plan, the nutrition, the recovery, the weekly result. Everything handled. Everyone in your corner shares your context.

Then it stops. No team. No coach. No diary being run for you. And plenty of people circling, looking to take a piece. Every athlete we’ve worked with has said the same thing in the first few weeks. You don’t know who to trust.

The first job, before any of the strategy or operations work, is to be someone they can think out loud with. Not a consultant landing a retainer. Not an agency angling at their following. Someone in their corner.

The instinct they already have

Jack and Andrew already know what a premium product and service looks like. They’ve spent their entire careers inside organisations where the public-facing performance has to be excellent or you don’t get to keep your jersey. They’ve got instincts most founders take years to develop, and you can feel it the first time they describe what they’re building. Brand, offer, customer experience, founder presence.

That part doesn’t need much from us.

The backroom they’ve never been in

What they haven’t done is the work behind the scenes. Backend systems. Data. Tools. Integrations that hold an operation together. Process design. KPIs. The unglamorous middle of a business that doesn’t get any of the credit.

There’s an analogy that helps. Athletes know what coaches and backroom staff deliver to them. They’ve spent their careers on the receiving end of it. Feedback after a match. What’s working. What needs to change next week. They trust the system because it earned that trust over a long time.

What they haven’t done is sit inside that backroom. The film analysis, the data, the load management, the meetings about them they’re never in. They’ve never needed to know how it actually operates.

As founders, they do. The business is now the squad and they’re the coach as well as the player.

A lot of our work is bringing them into that backroom slowly. Showing them what the dashboard looks like and why the metric matters. Walking them through a process before we build it together. We don’t dump it on them. They’d get overwhelmed and check out. But we keep moving them deeper into it, because they can’t run the business long-term without understanding how the engine runs.

They know how to follow a plan

The other shift is harder than people think. After ten or fifteen years of being told where to be and what to do, suddenly there’s no one telling you. No coach. No physio. No team manager. The diary is yours. The priorities are yours. The standards are yours.

A lot of people would drift. Athletes don’t, not for long. They know what it is to commit to a plan and stick to it for months at a time without seeing the result yet. They know consistency pays. They’ve lived inside it for years.

What they need from us is the plan. A clear one. Where we’re going, why, what the next ninety days look like, and what success looks like at the end of it. Then we keep them accountable. They recognise the structure immediately. It’s the same shape as a season.

The work ethic surprised me

What I didn’t expect was the engine.

After ten or fifteen years of brutal training and competition, you’ve earned the right to coast a bit on the way out. Neither Jack nor Andrew has done that. Both of them put in the hard yards every week. Both of them carry a level of resilience I haven’t seen in many founders.

Whatever they brought to professional sport, they’re bringing the same intensity to a longer game with murkier feedback. That’s the bit you can’t teach. Everything else we can build with them.

Read next: What AI is actually for — Hugh on building AI inside real businesses.